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Mao Zedong
(coming soon) Politics "Mao Zedong persecuted homosexuals, deeming them “deviant” and “decadent”. Prior to Communist rule, homosexuality had a rich and tolerated history in China, with Emperor Ai being the most famous homosexual leader. But as the Communist Party rose to power, Chinese LGBT+ people became persecuted. In the 1980s, independent education and freedom of speech were replaced by propaganda and censorship."http://junkee.com/marriage-equality-queer-people-colour/123790 Links :"The Chinese Stalinists led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) developed a particularly demented version of Stalinist doublespeak. “Capitalism” ceased to mean a concrete form of property relations; “following the capitalist road” became an epithet to be thrown at Mao’s opponents in the bureaucracy. Students were hailed as “proletarian revolutionaries” while being cynically mobilized to break workers strikes during the intrabureaucratic war known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” In Mao-speak, the struggle against supposed “Soviet social-imperialism” justified China’s rapprochement with the real American imperialists at the height of their dirty, losing war against the Vietnamese Revolution. :The bureaucrats who rule in the Forbidden City continue to call themselves “Communists” as they scramble to enrich themselves and their progeny and seek to become part of a new class of capitalist exploiters on the Chinese mainland. Like their Russian and East European counterparts who handed the former deformed workers states over to capitalist counterrevolution, the Chinese ruling caste must be swept away by proletarian political revolution. Those who seek today to defend and extend the social gains which resulted from the smashing of capitalism by the third Chinese Revolution of 1949 must reappropriate the program and goals which animated the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who sought to build a party representing the revolutionary class interests of the proletariat. :Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution provides the cornerstone of revolutionary strategy in countries of belated capitalist development. It anticipated and was confirmed by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, when for the first time in history the proletariat under revolutionary leadership took and held state power. In China in particular, the theory of permanent revolution, and Trotsky’s subsequent devastating critique of the Stalinized Communist International’s program of subordinating the Chinese proletariat to the bourgeois Guomindang (Kuomintang KMT), had an electrifying impact on many Chinese Communists." :"For Trotsky, who had fought against this betrayal, the Chinese events of 1925-27 were pivotal, enabling him to generalize the theory of permanent revolution to countries outside Russia. The Chinese Revolution proved by negative example that the path of permanent revolution was the necessary course for revolutionary change in all the countries of belated capitalist development. After 1927 Trotsky waged the struggle against the Stalinist usurpers under the banner of the permanent revolution." :"It was only the supporters of Leon Trotsky who, in the period of catastrophic defeat after the second Chinese Revolution, sought to maintain their roots among the urban working class. The 1930s did see some sporadic workers’ economic struggles in Shanghai and Hong Kong, in which the Trotskyists played leading roles. However the general prostration of the working masses, whose trade unions and other legal organizations had been smashed, took a great political toll. :For almost the entire period of its existence, the Chinese Trotskyist organization was condemned to an underground existence, first hunted down by the Guomindang police, then by the Japanese Occupation and Mao’s Stalinists. Within a month of the founding of the CLC, the entire Central Committee except Chen (Ch’en Tu-hsiu) and Peng Shuzhi (Peng Shu-tse) were arrested as the result of the actions of an informer; Chen and Peng were arrested in late 1932, transferred from Shanghai to Nanjing, put on trial, and sentenced to 13 years in jail. :The trial was a major event in China. Fearing that these two leaders would be condemned to death, a defense effort was launched that did succeed in getting the case transferred from a military to a civil court. Chen used the trial as a forum to indict the Chinese ruling class and defiantly defended his revolutionary career." :"In 1949 the coming to power in China of the Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong prepared the ground for the liberation of over half a billion workers and peasants from the yolk of landlordism and imperialism. By the mid-1950s not only had the basic task of the bourgeois democratic revolution been carried out – i.e. the abolition of landlordism, the end to colonial rule, genuine national unification and the establishment of the basic conditions for the development of capitalism – but capitalism itself had been snuffed out. :This development reconfirmed the basic idea developed by Leon Trotsky of the Permanent Revolution that the capitalist class in underdeveloped countries, having arrived late on the scene of history, was incapable of carrying out its own, bourgeois, revolution. It remained tied to the feudal landlords on the one hand and subservient to their imperialist masters on the other. :In the Russian Revolution the Menshevik position was that all countries had to pass through a democratic bourgeois stage before they could move towards socialism. This idea stated that a period of capitalist development was first required to build up industry and with it a modern working class. Only after such a period would it be possible to contemplate struggling for socialism. That explains why the Mensheviks sided with the Russian bourgeoisie and ended up in the camp of the counter-revolution. :The weakness in this idea was that it was based on a narrow national view of each country, which ignored the context of the global situation where the rise of powerful imperialist capitalist countries dominated the world market. This changed the conditions in which the fledgling nation al bourgeois classes could develop in the underdeveloped countries into modern capitalist ruling classes." :"By the time the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949 its leadership was steeped in this idea that after taking power the “bourgeois-democratic” stage would begin. That explains why Mao initially did not move towards the abolition of capitalism. He sought sections of the Chinese bourgeoisie with whom the workers and peasants could form an alliance." :"The key element in understanding how the CCP ended up abolishing capitalism in China is to be found in the fact that it had state power, i.e. the “armed bodies of men” were not the police and soldiers of a bourgeois state, but the “People’s Liberation Army”, mainly a peasant army under the control of the Communist Party. This meant the old semi-feudal/bourgeois state had been smashed by the advancing forces of Mao. :This state attempted to reach a compromise with the bourgeois elements, but this failed to materialise, not due to any conscious move on the part of the Communist Party leaders towards “socialism” but because the interests of the peasants and workers were irreconcilable with those of the corrupt Chinese national bourgeoisie. Step by step Mao found himself having to take over the whole economy and by the mid-1950s China had become what we would term as a “deformed workers’ state”. By this is meant a state where the economic base of a workers’ state has been established, i.e. the expropriation of the landlords and the capitalists, state ownership of the means of production and centralised planning, but it is “deformed” because the workers do not hold state power directly, do not have control over the system as a whole." References ---- }} Category:Historical Astrology Category:History Category:Communism Category:Marxism Category:Socialism Category:China Category:Asian Culture Category:Asia